Collins Does DnD 5e

Having never done any DnD before I wanted to start with something reasonably simple but fun. I did zero research and simply followed the instructions on dndbeyond to create my character. I do like the idea of being the opposite of what I perceive myself to be in real life so I went for the Harrison Ford of the world, a rogue, because who doesn’t secretly want to be Han Solo?

After a session or two we had all fleshed out our ideas, got some basic equipment and the artist of the group started to ask us all questions about what we looked like etc.

She then merrily went off and started drawing and painting sketches of what we explained to her!

Note, all the artwork is not mine! but it is part of our tale.

As my skills are more learning towards mini painting than artwork so I offered up that skill too. I had obviously heard of heroforge and started to look around for other cool models that would suit…. then BOW/OTT offered us Gorr the Barbarian as a freebie from TitanForge one weekend.

With the exception of the barbarian bit this perfectly suited Aldor, the double axe wielding Goliath fighter! in his early days he had issues in combat, namely hitting anything due to player fault rather than dice roll (remember to add those modifiers people!) and in his back story for some unknown reason that player had decided that every time he buggers up a combat Aldor brought out the lampshade of shame and stood in the corner.

It got annoying fast and the rogue eventually stole it and send it floating down the river in the goblin cave near the triboar trail. A bit mean, but in reality it was bloody annoying trying to convince him that he wasn’t awful every 5 minutes…

So as I go on with this I decided to turn my attention to the ranger ‘Tiri’. Choosing a model for this one was somewhat difficult.

Firstly the character belongs to my wife, secondly, finding a model that represents a nice airy, graceful air genasi, and then one that has a bow or suitable weapon for a ranger, or in her current inventory.

I spent quite a long time trawling the internet for a suitable model that would keep my wife happy. In the end, TitanForge released their latest promotional photos and in the April file pack came a mage character that happens to relatively graceful. I thought it semi-suitable, the wife approved and so I signed up to the TitanForge Patreon and gained access to all their released files for the current month and last month for £10. pretty cheap really.

So I painted Tiri somewhat close to her artwork, with different shades of brown and mild orange as clothing and blue skin etc.

I offered it up to the group chat and the feedback that came back that a lighter, less leathery looking floaty dress with a suggestion of sky blue to reflect the history of the air genasi… namely sky

I broke out the iPad and did a bit of markup recolouring on the photograph to see what it would look like, the ‘owner’ of the character (my wife) liked it and so that was it, it needed changing.

I’ve been slowly making my way though the models for this and here is the third offering, Kel! the half elf Barbarian.

In the game she’s actually quite small and svelt (thin, trim, lean) but is somehow still the ‘healthiest’ of us all (rules) so finding a model that represented that was hard. Add into the fact that obviously the player has to like it too. As with Tiri, its not impossible and I ended up using one of the barbarian bladesmasters from Andrea Tarabella on myminifactory.

so infuriatingly I was not able to get ‘better’ pictures in my PhotoBooth than I was sat on the sofa!

I think its due to the light in my living room being quite warm or orange in comparison to the whiter light I have for the photo light box. that and the background being a more similar warm colour to the skin tone.

I also tried taking pictures during the day, with that adding to it and during the night under lamps.

If anyone knows how I could change or improve this let me know. My set up is pretty ghetto for photography.

1. bog standard Photo Booth from eBay with black/blue/red/white backgrounds
2. iPad Pro camera
3. desk lamp with warmish LED
4. 2x borrowed bike lights that are quite cool in temp but bright like the night sun. can be dialled down, and were for this and additionally defused with paper.

Like I said, pretty ghetto but as you can see I did manage to get some good pictures with the set up of my previous models, just this one was much lighter in shade/tone etc that probably had something to do with it.

Moving onto my character! Bimir the Rogue, affectionately referred to by Kel as the ‘Sneaky Bastard Elf’.

This is the first model I bought and printed off, but I wanted to paint the others in my group first as their artwork was available a lot sooner.

I decided to make my own character on heroforge.com. That website is very cool and only gets better! I would say however, compared to the other models i’ve bought and printed this one is somewhat low poly. I guess that it is the trade off i’ve made to get something I have designed (within parameters) with pose, weapons etc. This low polyness was most noticeable on the cape even after priming and painting.

The good thing about hero forge is that you can add stuff to the base. Being a rogue thief Bimir is driven by the gold, gems and general loot…normally being the first to declare looting the room, usually before combat has actually ended, after all, that’s what barbarians are for…

He sadly had a runin with the redbrants early on and took an arrow to the face causing a permanent minus 1 to charisma thanks to a nasty scar, that can be seen in the artwork and on the model.

the artwork all has a theme of a splash of colour being added into each one and Bimir was no different. He has purple gems on his cloak but this model also has some gauntlets with some things that could be painted as gems too so I did! didn’t have a purple in my paint collection so had to mix one which was a massive failure, I really need to work on colour theory! Colour theory and photography.